Legacy of a Spy (10 page)

SLATER WENT OUT into the mid-afternoon sunlight. The sun, unimpeded by any clouds, had drunk heavily of the snow in the village, and the sidewalks and streets were beginning to dry out. There would be little slush left for the night to freeze. Spring was definitely on its way. He went to an outside pay station and phoned his hotel. He recognized Anton’s voice.

“I would like a room with a bath,” Slater said.

“For what dates, please?”

“For a week, starting tonight.”

“Your name please, sir.” Anton’s patience was obvious.

“Oh, yes,” Slater gave a nervous laugh. “Excuse me. You can’t very well reserve a room for someone who doesn’t give his name, can you?” Slater laughed again. There was a pause.

“Your name, sir.”
Anton’s patience sounded endless.

“Oh, yes. I don’t know
what’s the matter with me
. Slater, William Slater. I’m an American,” he added quickly.

“Yes, sir.
Can you check in by five o’clock?”

Slater looked at his watch. It was already almost three. That didn’t give him much time.

“Yes, I guess so. I’ll be there.”

“Very good, sir.”
Anton hung up.

Slater pushed open the glass door of the telephone station and walked back to the hotel. He headed in the direction of the men’s room. He took the moment that Anton’s attention was elsewhere and slipped up the stairs to his room.

He changed into Carmichael’s clothing and packed his suitcase. After going over his room very carefully to make certain he had left nothing incriminating lying around. He went downstairs to the desk.

“I would like my bill, please. I’m checking out,” said Slater.

“I hope you have enjoyed your stay with us, Mr. Carmichael,” said Anton, “and you will remain longer the next time.” His little speech sounded like a broken record.

“I appreciated your service, Anton,” said Slater.

Anton’s eyebrows
raised
. His eyes shouted a warning not to elaborate any further on his “service.” The ten-dollar bribe for the room had certainly not gone to the hotel. Slater looked as if he were about to continue, and Anton presented the bill immediately. He didn’t even count the change until Slater had left. When Anton finally counted the money, it was ten dollars short. Anton’s dead face suddenly became apoplectic. He had to call the assistant and fortify himself with generous shots of Steinhäger in his room.

Slater got into the Volkswagen, tipped the porter too generously for bringing his suitcase and drove out of the village and onto the main road along the valley floor toward Kirchberg. He parked the car just long enough to get his shoes, pants and sport jackets from his suitcase and close it up again. He removed his hairpiece as he drove; and when he parked, finally, in front of a small restaurant, he changed his elevator shoes before leaving the car.

The restaurant was deserted, and he went straight into the men’s room, washed his face and changed his clothes. When he emerged, there was still no one in sight! Apparently, the proprietor had decided, from long experience no doubt, that four o’clock was no time for business and had simply left the place unattended. Whatever the reason, Slater was just as well pleased not to bump into anyone, and he got back into the car and drove the rest of the way to Kirchberg.

He stopped the car once more, while he carefully packed away Carmichael’s things and got out a canvas cover. He shut up the suitcase, locked it and zipped up the canvas cover. The suitcase now looked just different enough not to be obviously the same one Carmichael had carried.

Slater found a garage and asked the attendant, who looked more like a farmer than a mechanic, to keep the car for him until later that evening. The farmer-mechanic phoned for a taxi; and, eventually, a dilapidated old open touring car, which looked as if it would hold at least twenty people, arrived; and Slater, the driver and the machine, which sounded like a cement mixer, chugged back down the road to Kitzbühel. Slater slipped down in the seat as far as he could when they entered the village, reflecting that he was still five feet above the road and that this was the most spectacular entrance one of the United States’ clandestine counterespionage agents had ever made into any town.

Several blocks past the Winterhof Hotel, he yelled at the driver to stop, jumped out quickly, paid the driver too much and, shaking his head, walked slowly back to the hotel. It was exactly five o’clock when he entered, and the Winterhof was packed with returning skiers. Everything went smoothly and he was given room 27 by Anton.

Slater got out his writing equipment and wrote a letter to George Hollingsworth, via Paris, giving the return address of William A. Slater, Winterhof Hotel, and explaining that Mahler might phone George to say that Carmichael was missing. If so, the phone call was to be believed. Slater arranged the names of the people he suspected into two columns and in the order of what he believed to be their importance and their function. It was rather early in the game to do this, but he had to arrive at some conclusion, no matter how tentative, so that his office and Hollingsworth would not be quite so much in the dark as they had all been when Webber disappeared. Slater asked his office to check on Herr Krüpl, knowing that so much was
happening
so fast the answer, if they had one, would probably be too late. He asked again for the identity of the German agent, and said that he would okay his office’s giving his identity to German Intelligence. Their agent could identify himself to Slater by saying that he had a message from his friend Ben in Paris. Slater’s reply would be that the only Parisians he knew were female.

Slater put down his ball-point pen. The letter in front of him was still, apparently, blank, and he had written four pages. He didn’t want to have his real identity known to German Intelligence, but this whole affair was too complicated, and he would need their agent’s help. The intricacies of international relationships were becoming more and more bewildering. Slater was certain he was working against the Communists. He was equally certain he had met some of the people involved, and he had as yet not met a Russian. It was American against American, against German, against an Englishman, against an Austrian. Nor was it simply a question of ideology. Some worked for power, for money, for adventure, and some because they were afraid. The only approach Slater had found satisfactory to unravel his opponents’ networks was to attack them functionally from an organizational point of view. Since the signposts of nationality and ideology no longer had much meaning, Slater had to discern, from his knowledge of espionage patterns, his opponents’ organization. Whenever two or more people worked together, they had to have organization; and the problems, inherent in all espionage activity, were such that all their operations necessarily followed the same general procedures. Slater knew these procedures, and many of their variations. His opponents were ingenious and ruthless, but they made mistakes; and the more people involved in an operation, the more room there was for human error. He watched for, and counted on, these errors. The trouble was they did the same, and he made mistakes. He had already made several. The one that worried him the most was his activation of Rüdi and the receipt of the $170. Slater should have gotten someone else to do that. He should get someone else to meet Webber tonight—Mahler, for example. The Russian Intelligence officers almost never did their own dirty work. Why should he? Suppose Mahler did get killed. Or, even worse, suppose he were to be questioned? He only knew Carmichael, not Slater. This was the dirtiest business in the world. An Intelligence officer’s job was to accomplish his mission and keep out of the hands of the opposition. The end always justified the means. Slater winced. That was what the Communists said about their own aims.

Slater shrugged and smiled ruefully. After all, he was going to send someone else to meet Webber. He was going to send Carmichael.

AT EIGHT-THIRTY that evening, Slater arrived at the garage in Kirchberg and picked up the car. It was already quite dark, but the night was clear and the moon would be up within an hour. Slater drove back toward Kitzbühel and turned off on a little side road about two kilometers from the village. He opened a paper-wrapped parcel beside him on the front seat and managed to dress himself as Carmichael. He had to get out of the car to change his trousers and realized, for the first time, how cold it was. His teeth chattered for several moments even after he was back in the car with the heater on. He knew it was more than the cold that made him shiver. He turned the car around and turned back onto the main road. After crossing the railroad tracks, he turned off the Schwarzseestrasse and drove into narrow streets that were little more than alleyways skirting the main section of town, across the Josef Pirchlstrasse and onto the Hornweg. He crossed the Ache
river
and the railroad, and started climbing up toward the Kitzbüheler Horn.

According to the map, Webber’s farmhouse was on the left-hand side of the road, about halfway up the mountain, exactly two kilometers from the railroad. Slater took the mileage and switched on his bright lights. The road was steep all right, and icy in spots, but the Volkswagen skidded and lurched its way upward. According to the speedometer, he had less than four-tenths of a kilometer to go, and he kept his eye on the left side of the road. At exactly two kilometers he saw the farmhouse. It was about twenty yards above the road, and an ice-rutted driveway went up to the side door. Slater doubted that even the Volkswagen could negotiate that and he continued driving up past the driveway. He hadn’t intended to drive in, in any case. He drove for another kilometer, up and around the hairpin turns that seemed to meet each other coming backward. He finally found a place in which to turn around and then, putting the car in low gear and dimming his lights, allowed the car to go back down the mountain. Just above the farmhouse, he switched off the lights and motor and braked the car very cautiously past the farm house, coming to a full stop at the middle of the looping turn immediately below.

Slater stepped out of the car quietly, tied crampons on his shoes, and started up the steep mountainside toward the farmhouse. He couldn’t see it now, because it was set well back above the ridge. The tip of a crescent moon appeared above the range of mountains behind him and cast its reflected sunlight down into the valley, etching everything for miles into silver and black. The moon rose above the mountains faster than Slater could climb and was soon bright enough to cast his shadow before him. Slater swore, but continued to dig into the snow with the steel points of his crampons. He had little trouble keeping his silhouette low, as the bank was steep, and he was forced to hug it as he climbed. It was the ridge he was worried about. At the top he would stand out like a great dark shadow on the snowfield above. Why, Slater asked himself, couldn’t he once be in a position where he could act like a sensible, normal human being? Why couldn’t he accept Webber’s letter as being genuine? It probably was, and the farmer might shoot him for an intruder or some wild animal, and who could blame him? Visitors with an open conscience didn’t come stealthily after dark across a snowfield. If Webber’s letter was not genuine, then he would probably get shot anyway. It was, Slater knew, simply the result of a nervous past, which made suspicion of everything and everyone second nature. He was doing this crazy thing because it might give him a slight edge in the event something went wrong. Even the slightest advantage made it worth the effort. The only thing Slater had no choice about was whether to investigate. He had to do that, but hugging ice-encrusted snow on a moonlit night in the Austrian Alps was not his idea of the best way to stay alive.

Slater turned his head and looked down. The roadway was a black ribbon in the moonlight and seemed to curve downward forever. If he slipped now, his body would hurtle down the ice slopes until it crashed into an outcropping of ice-covered rocks or was smashed into bits at the bottom. Slater closed his eyes and dug in again with his feet. He shook his head to clear it and began to sweat. He waited for a moment for his heart to stop pounding and then started up again. He estimated that he couldn’t be more than a few feet from the top of the ridge.

His head appeared above the top, and then his shoulders and chest. He reached his arms over the bank and tried to get a hold with his fingers, but the icy crust was too thick, and he had to push himself over the ridge and onto the sloping snowfield with his feet. He lay
there,
finally, all of him on the gentle slope, and panted heavily, his breath forming a halo of mist in the cold night air. He looked in the direction of the farmhouse and saw the pale lights in the downstairs windows. The farmhouse was steep roofed and loomed very large in the moonlight. Slater picked himself up and crunched through the snow, diagonally, toward the rear of the house. The crust held his weight and the walking was much easier, but Slater swore that he would go back via the road no matter what happened in that farmhouse. He got all the way to the rear of the main building before he heard a dog barking, and he waited in the shadow of a bare-limbed tree in the yard.

He didn’t have to wait long before he heard a man’s voice shouting at the dog to be quiet. Slater looked at the radium dial of his watch. It was nine-fifty. He was right on
time
. He heard the side door open and saw a man come out alone. The man was big and stoopshouldered, and was carrying a rifle. He walked carefully toward the front of the house and then turned back toward the rear. Slater jumped him as soon as the man was opposite the tree, chopping him in the back of the neck with the side of his hand. The man dropped to the snow without a sound. Slater took his rifle and gagged him with his scarf, then took the rawhide laces from his high boots and tied his wrists behind him with one and his ankles with the other. Slater dragged him behind the tree and looked him over carefully. The man was, undoubtedly, a farmer. If Webber was right, the farmer was slightly on the greedy side, but otherwise okay. If Webber was wrong, Slater had just reduced whatever odds might be against him by one man.

Slater looked over the driveway carefully for a moment, bent over and untied his crampons, and then went to the side door. He turned the handle and let himself in. He found himself in a poorly heated hallway. Coats and jackets were hanging from hooks along the walls. Cautiously, he opened the door at the far end and came face to face with the barrel of a Luger.